Dave Johnson
Brown University Computer Science
ddj%brown@csnet-relay.ARPA
{ihnp4,decvax,allegra,ulysses,linus}!brunix!ddj
===================
Here's an informal description of the HQX format as I understand it:
-----
The first and last characters are each a ':'. After the first ':',
the rest of the file is just string of 6 bit encoded characters.
All newlines and carriage returns are to be ignored.
The tricky part is that there are holes in the translation string
so you have to look up each file character to get its binary 6 bit
value. I found the string by looking at a hex dump of BinHex:
!"#$%&'()*+,-012345689@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNPQRSTUVXYZ[`abcdefhijklmpqr
I can't see how this aids or abets any kind of error recovery, but
if you ran into a char not in the list, you would know something's
wrong and give up.
There is some run length encoding, where the character to be repeated
is followed by a 0x90 byte then the repeat count. For example, ff9004
means repeat 0xff 4 times. The special case of a repeat count of zero
means it's not a run, but a literal 0x90. 2b9000 => 2b90.
*** Note: the 9000 can be followed by a run, which means to repeat the
0x90 (not the character previous to that). That is, 2090009003 means
a 0x20 followed by 3 0x90's.
Once you've turned the 6 bit chars into 8, you can parse the header.
The header format consists of a one byte name length, then the mac
file name, then a null. The rest of the header is 20 bytes long,
and contains the usual file type, creator/author, file flags, data
and resource lengths, and the two byte crc value for the header.
The data fork and resource fork contents follow in that order.
There is a two byte file crc at the end of each fork. If a fork
is empty, there will be no bytes of contents and the checksum
will be two bytes of zero.
So the decoded data between the first and last ':' looks like:
1 n 4 4 2 4 4 2 (length)
+-+---------+-+----+----+----+----+----+--+
|n| name... |0|TYPE|AUTH|FLAG|DLEN|RLEN|HC| (contents)
+-+---------+-+----+----+----+----+----+--+
DLEN 2 (length)
+--------------------------------------+--+
| DATA FORK |DC| (contents)
+--------------------------------------+--+
RLEN 2 (length)
+--------------------------------------+--+
| RESOURCE FORK |RC| (contents)
+--------------------------------------+--+